In the technology of ballot transaction processing, it is desirable to develop apparatus and methods for processing paper ballots, such as by optically scanning or optically reading those ballots, in a more efficient and reliable manner. The improvements described herein relate to technologies for processing ballots, tabulating votes and in particular technologies for auditing all tally results from an optical scan-based ballot tabulator.
It is generally known to print certain identifying information on a ballot when the ballot is printed before an election. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,892,944 discloses providing on each ballot a voter registration number that can include a barcode, two-dimensional barcode, a prescribed font, optical character recognition characters, alphanumeric characters, non-alphanumeric characters and symbols. Further, this patent discloses that the voter registration number can include information such as the voter's state, county, precinct etc. in addition to a randomly generated number that is printed on the ballot prior to election. However, this pre-printed information violates voter secrecy and does not prevent ballot stuffing or provide an adequate one-to-one correspondence between images of optically scanned ballots and the ballots themselves.
There are numerous voting technologies known that are directed to permitting votes to be cast and recorded efficiently while maintaining the secrecy of the ballot.
Of paramount importance in an election process is the efficient verification and auditing of voting results. One of the obstacles associated with the verification is that there is usually a subjective determination made when determining the voter intent. For example, in the case of mechanical based systems that punch out a hole in a ballot, subjective determinations have had to be made in well-publicized cases to determine the voter intent with respect to partially attached chads. These subjective determinations lead to inconsistent results and have a negative impact on public perception of vote integrity. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a ballot processing system that objectively determines voter intent in a consistent and reliable manner and that provides a mechanism for auditing the results on a vote-by-vote basis.
Of equal importance is a process of tracking the transaction of a ballot while the vote is being reviewed prior to casting. To this end, various systems have been developed to track the voting process. However, these systems can be susceptible to tampering. Therefore, it is desirable to develop a more efficient and secure means of tracking a ballot transaction.
While many systems provide for auditing vote totals and recounting results, it is desirable to provide a more secure, efficient audit process that can audit an individual vote across all records of this vote including the paper ballot, the electronic record of the cast vote, and the digital image of the ballot.